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艺术让人们感官飞舞，神采奕奕。
THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON ART
By Sarah L. Kaufman, Dani Player, Jayne Orenstein, May-Ying Lam, Elizabeth Hart and Shelly Tan
When we experience art, we feel connected to something larger. Why?
If you think about it, having a great time at the theater defies logic in many ways. We’re surrounded by strangers, bombarded with unusual images and often faced with a wordless language of symbols. Yet, on a good night, we generally laugh more, cry more and enjoy ourselves more at a live performance than when we’re watching TV at home. We may even lose ourselves and feel connected to something larger. How does this happen?
使逻辑失去很多用处defies logic in many ways应接不暇bombarded with
Some of the answers to art’s mysteries can be found in the realm of science. Art is considered the domain of the heart, but its transporting effects start in the brain, where intricate systems perceive and interpret it with dazzling speed. Using brain-imaging and other tools of neuroscience, the new field of neuroaesthetics is probing the relationship between art and the brain.
科学领域in the realm of science
Social connection is one of the strengths of our species — it’s how we learn from others by imitation. We’re keenly attuned to the emotions and actions of people around us, because our brains are designed for this.
强烈感知适应的keenly attuned to
If, for example, you’ve ever gone to an experimental performance-art piece where there’s hardly anyone in the audience but you, and you’ve felt a little exposed and awkward, this is why. We crave social connection. And the cues we get from those around us help our brains make sense of our surroundings. This starts from the moment we walk into a crowd.
渴望crave
...
Social connection is a key function of our brains. It helps us make sense of human behavior, a large part of which is evaluating movement and emotion within us and around us. Our brains like to share emotions with others. This is just one reason that seeing a live performance — a concert, play, opera, etc. — is a neural rush. With our brain’s capacity for emotion and empathy, even in the wordless art of dance we can begin to discover meaning — and a story.
神经上的洗礼neural rush
484
You Are the Product
By John Lanchester
At the end of June, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. That number, the company’s preferred ‘metric’ when measuring its own size, means two billion different people used Facebook in the preceding month. It is hard to grasp just how extraordinary that is. Bear in mind that the Facebook – its original name – was launched exclusively for Harvard students in 2004. No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as television or cinema or radio.
上一个月 in the preceding month.
Zuckerberg’s news about Facebook’s size came with an announcement which may or may not prove to be significant. He said that the company was changing its ‘mission statement’, its version of the canting pieties beloved of corporate America. Facebook’s mission used to be ‘making the world more open and connected’. A non-Facebooker reading that is likely to ask: why? Connection is presented as an end in itself, an inherently and automatically good thing. Is it, though? Flaubert was sceptical about trains because he thought (in Julian Barnes’s paraphrase) that ‘the railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid.’ You don’t have to be as misanthropic as Flaubert to wonder if something similar isn’t true about connecting people on Facebook. For instance, Facebook is generally agreed to have played a big, perhaps even a crucial, role in the election of Donald Trump. The benefit to humanity is not clear. This thought, or something like it, seems to have occurred to Zuckerberg, because the new mission statement spells out a reason for all this connectedness. It says that the new mission is to ‘give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together’.
483
不断问问自己如何到这一步，会有意想不到的收获，原来自己好几年前的一个想法铸就了现在的自己。
Why Am I Here?
By Derek Sivers
Looking around the room.
“Why am I here?”
It’s a useful question to ask often.
Either it will re-focus your reasons for being where you are, or it will make you realize your reasons have expired and you should be somewhere else.
In a little apartment in Singapore, I ask it again.
“Why am I here?”
Because of the brilliant and fascinating people here.
(But I’m refusing all requests to meet, to stay focused on my work. For the past 3 years I was very social, but now I’m not.)
Because I love learning about Asia, and Singapore is a great central home base for that.
(But I’m not exploring Asia right now. For the past 3 years I was, but now I’m inwardly-focused on my writing and programming.)
Because I love and admire it, and it feels like home.
(But I’ve loved everywhere I’ve lived, from California to New York to London to Portland. They’ve all felt like home. Future places will feel like home, too.)
Because I’m here right now.
(But there are airplanes. You can sit in them.)
Most of us are where we are because of decisions we made years ago. But are those reasons still current for what we need now? Ask again.
“Why am I here?”
Damn. I ran out of reasons. I should be somewhere else.
I want silence, solitude, and wide open spaces.
I want to work all day while listening to nothing but birds and wind in the trees.
I want an intentional lack of distractions, far far away, to cure my tendency to say yes to intellectually stimulating events.
So the answer was clear.
I moved to New Zealand’s South Island.
Here I am.
“Why am I here?”
To work. To focus. To write. To code. To launch.
Yes. Good answer.
481
有空还是要多看点书，不过对于经常看书的人来说，有空还是要多问问自己学得东西，做到了没有。
Visit the Library
By Steve Pavlina
When was the last time you made a trip to the local public library? In addition to some rather smelly books, my local library has a small collection of audio programs too, and I can renew most items online for up to 9 weeks before having to return them.
You may not find the latest and greatest new releases, but at least it’s free. I often check out a bunch of items that interest me and then skim through them at home at my leisure. It’s a great way to pick up some new ideas and prevent staleness of thought.
It’s funny how often today’s best “secrets of success” can be found in the writings of Socrates, Franklin, or Emerson. It’s humbling to think I’ve figured out a new secret to life, the universe, and everything, only to later discover that Aristotle had me beat by 2350 years. And despite the archaic language, the classics are often easier to comprehend because they were written long before marketing messed us all up.
480
Middle School Is a Gauntlet
My Dear Advisees
By Henry Walker
middle school is a gauntlet:
as you push yourself to move forward,
you seem to remember how much easier
it was just yesterday,
you feel how hard it is
to keep your eye on the future coming at you,
to keep true to the best of who you are,
while doubts and mistakes and exhaustion
hit at you, work to hold you back,
the gauntlet does its best to deny you
the rightness and the power
that is your birthright,
as your advisor, I hope to help you
persevere, to find your way forward,
to help you deny the deniers,
to break through to the best within you
that is who you are
when you will not be denied.
479
How to Be a Modern Parent
By Perri Klass, M.D. and Lisa Damour
We all want to be the best parents we can be for our children, but there is often conflicting advice on how to raise a kid who is confident, kind and successful. Throughout the circus act of parenting, it’s important to focus on balancing priorities, juggling responsibilities and quickly flipping between the needs of your children, other family members and yourself. Modern parents have the entire internet at their disposal and don’t follow any single authority. It’s hard to know whom or what to trust. Here, we’ll talk about how to help your child grow up to be a person you really like without losing yourself in the process.
…
Good news: There is no one right way to raise a child.
Research tells us that to raise a self-reliant child with high self-esteem, it is more effective to be authoritative than authoritarian. You want your child to listen, respect and trust you rather than fear you. You want to be supportive, but not a hovering, helicopter parent.
All of these things are easy to set as goals, but hard to achieve. How do you find the right balance?
As your child develops, the challenges will change, and your thinking may evolve, but your approach should be consistent, firm and loving. Help your child learn through experience that making an effort builds confidence and helps you learn to tackle challenges. Calibrate your expectations about what your child is capable of doing independently, whether you have an infant learning to sleep through the night, a toddler helping to put toys away, or an older child resolving conflicts.
Remember, there is no one right way to raise a child. Do your best, trust yourself and enjoy the company of the small person in your life.
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